On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Bruno Girin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 17:49 +0100, Liam Proven wrote: > <snip> >> >> I am interested: do people really find Xubuntu much lighter, faster or >> more resource-frugal than vanilla GNOME Ubuntu? In my experiments, I >> don't, & GNOME offers novice-friendly features like the ability to >> lock panel widgets & controls into place, progress bars on file >> operations and stuff like that. > > Well, my completely unscientific comparison between 3 systems currently > running Ubuntu shows the following memory usage when idle: > * Karmic Ubuntu laptop: ~400MB, > * Karmic UNR EeePc: ~200MB, > * Lucid Xubuntu laptop: ~100MB. > > The difference is not huge and wouldn't make much of a difference on the > first 2 machines, as they each have 2GB RAM installed. However, the > third one has 384MB RAM so having an OS that uses just above a quarter > of the physical RAM means that it hardly ever swaps, which makes a huge > difference in terms of user response. > > In terms of pure processing power, I can't really see a difference > between Ubuntu and Xubuntu so far. > > So my first impression is that using Xubuntu rather than Ubuntu really > makes a difference on machines that are limited in physical RAM (say > less than 512MB). This would be compounded on older machines that have a > slow hard disk and for which swapping can kill performance. > > At the end of the day, the final word has to be with the end user: in > this case the Xubuntu box is my girlfriend's old laptop that she's being > forced to use while she finds a replacement for her main computer that > recently died and her first reaction in using it today was "wow, it's > fast!"
Wow! Impressive! Fair play to you, and thanks for that. Maybe I should give it another look! Currently have Intrepid NBR running on my Thinkpad X31 & whereas there are a few wrinkles with it, I'm impressed, and it feels faster than 9.x did. I might try Xubuntu as well... -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: [email protected] • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: [email protected] Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: [email protected] • ICQ: 73187508 -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
